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Ever since the story broke about the Internal Revenue Service and the Tea Party, ABC has found it less newsworthy than either NBC or CBS. So ABC has some excuse for not following up with the revelation by IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel that the BOLO scrutiny ("be on the lookout") of social welfare organizations for signs of non-exempt political activism applied to self-styled progressives as well as to self-styled patriots. NBC had no such excuse for its failure to set the record straight. CBS did, with Nancy Cordes on Capitol Hill.
CBS spotted a looming headline grabber by assigning Manuel Bojorquez to the special session of the Texas legislature and its debate over an abortion bill. Bojorquez was exquisitely even-handed in characterizing both the bill's pro-life benefits -- improving the quality of women's healthcare facilities, preventing fetal pain in utero -- and its anti-choice restrictions, namely that all but five of the state's 42 abortion clinics would be shuttered if the legislation passes.
He is not dead yet, but both Keir Simmons on NBC and Ron Claiborne on ABC filed a brief stand-up from Pretoria to tell us that they are in poisition on the Nelson Mandela death watch. Debora Patta did the same for CBS on Friday.
In its News You Can Use enthusiasm, sometimes ABC turns its newscast into a video version of high school Drivers Ed. Just in the last three months, we have had Matt Gutman on handling highway flash floods, Paula Faris on improving the daily commute, David Kerley on driving through fog and ice, Lisa Stark on escaping from submerged cars. Now, Gio Benitez files the latest Drivers Ed episode, offering coping tips for road rage from automotive psychologist Ryan Fuller.
Thursday, I complimented Clayton Sandell at ABC on his efforts to cover the Colorado wildfire season with journalistic value, rather than merely filing out-of-control weatherporn. Well, Sandell does it again: sure, he voices over a video reel of calamity -- tornadoes, winds, floods, fires -- but then he delivers federal NOAA data on how climate change has hiked the cost of disasters in the last 30 years. Well done Gabe Gutierrez on NBC too, offering an ecological reason for why the forests in Colorado burn so fiercely. Damn you, spruce bark beetle!
NBC and CBS both mentioned Rusty, the escaped red panda from the National Zoo, in passing. What was ABC thinking, on such a heavy news day, when it made time for an entire package by correspondent David Kerley?
Alex Weprin at mediabistro's TVNewser points out that the previous high-wire tightrope stunt by Nik Wallenda, over Niagara Falls, had been hosted by Josh Elliott of ABC's Good Morning America. NBC's Anne Thompson now gives us highlights of Wallenda's latest walk, over the Little Colorado River gorge near the Grand Canyon, as covered by cable TV's Discovery Channel. Thompson did offer a Wallenda soundbite from NBC's Today, but she omitted the detail that Weprin notes when he called the two stunts "a proxy war between ABC News and NBC News" -- namely that Discovery may have aired the Canyon walk but NBC News produced it and provided its hosts. What message was Thompson trying to send with such a glaring omission?
For the third time in four years, CBS waxes elegiac about the past glories of Big Steel. Cynthia Bowers traveled to the Monongahela Valley when the NFL Steelers played in Super Bowl XLIII. Sharyl Attkisson mourned the closing of Sparrows Point in Maryland last fall. Now Jim Axelrod takes a tour with 80-year-old Richie Check of the ghost of the mill that was once Bethlehem Steel.
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